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You have an idea or you’re given a pitch
and you have to decide if it has ‘marketability’…

Yet every film distributed in the U.S. had someone who decided
that it was “marketable” – and 75% of those films failed to clear a profit.

How could the audience 'smell' that the film contained something to avoid? 
Those films were marketed consistently well before opening weekend,
but when they came to the theater, nobody showed up.
  

Why?  There was a problem that the studio hadn’t counted on.
And this problem was seen by the audience weeks and months ahead of the opening.

The problem is the lack of 'playability'.

The film was remiss in playability. And an audience can sense problems in ‘playability’ the minute they see the marketing … long before the feature’s opening.

It was observed by film-going audiences through prerelease talk shows, TV interviews, previews of coming attractions, commercials, advertising graphics, key art, trailers on the Internet and in entertainment reviews.


Audiences stay home because of the lack of playability that was
visually and vocally ‘articulated’ before the film’s opening weekend.

Today’s sophisticated audiences have an innate psychological ability to discern a film’s playability from watching the actor’s faces and their telegraphed feelings in trailers.  They judge the storyline playability from what they see was actually produced…not what they imagined would be created when they were surveyed beforehand.
  
Because the studio researched the mass audience before production (by asking them what kind of story points they imagined they would like to see) and then they produced what they thought the audience had indicated, the studio blames the marketing guys claiming they must have sold the product incorrectly.
  
But in reality, the film itself contained the playability errors that couldn’t have been sold to and audience no matter what kind of marketing they conjured up.  A marketable film with negative issues in playability can’t succeed at the U.S. box-office – no matter how marketable the studio or distributor thinks the film is. 
 
Even if the marketing guys had tried to hide the lack of playability in marketing, the audience still detects playability issues from the projection of the talent’s articulation – so positive word-of-mouth is lost and the film tanks.  It doesn’t matter how good your story-points are if you have problems in the way you formulated the presentation.  If you ignore playability it doesn’t matter how well you market.
 
But if a film has playability formulated correctly, audiences will seek that playability out and tell their friends to go see it as well – even if pre-production surveys said they wouldn’t see it.  Once they see the faces and hear the voices articulated in pre-release marketing, they are yours.

At CFI™, it’s all about guaranteeing your playability and the way audiences relate to what you produce for them.  It’s all about the audience and what they think about what they’re seeing...or smelling.